In cinemas for a few days and massively promoted, “Ennio Doris – There’s also tomorrow” is a hagiographic celebration of the banker who founded Banca Mediolanum and of the institution itself
The film has been in cinemas since yesterday Ennio Doris – There is also tomorrowtaken from the 2014 autobiography of the famous banker and founder of Banca Mediolanum Ennio Doris (the title is very similar to the film by Paola Cortellesi There’s still tomorrow, therefore, it is a coincidence). It is a traditional biographical film, that is, one of those that tell the story of the protagonist starting from when he is little and continuing up to his mature age, whereas the more modern ones often focus on a single episode to tell the story of an entire life.
The story and career of Doris – played by Massimo Ghini – are shown in rather hagiographic tones, which enhance her goodness, kindness, altruism and genius. The same tones that the film dedicates to the institute that Doris founded, presented as revolutionary in its approach to private savings and celebrated at times with the language normally reserved for advertising.
The company that produced the film, Movie Magic International, is making its first film and is actually active mostly in the advertising sector. It was distributed and co-financed by Medusa, a company of the Mediaset group owned by the Berlusconi family, also co-owner of Banca Mediolanum: in short, the promotional intent of the entire operation is evident, which is rather unusual also due to the proximity of death of Doris, which took place in 2021. The film was promoted massively, arousing different reactions and ironies. But judging from the first results it seems that, with all the limitations of the case, the operation was successful, and guaranteed visibility and attention around Doris and, therefore, to Banca Mediolanum.
There is also tomorrow it proceeds along two story lines: the present of the film, in 2008, and then the past, that is, Doris’s childhood and youth. In the present Ennio Doris learns of the bankruptcy of the financial investment company Lehman Brothers and to protect customers, whose savings have been invested in securities destined to collapse, he decides to use the assets of him and the other founder of Banca Mediolanum Silvio Berlusconi. In the past, however, we are told of his very humble origins, but of sound principles, and his training in the banking sector, which he quickly climbed.
To do this, the film tries to model the young version of Ennio Doris, the one active in the 80s, on the finance men of recent cinema. A model for the look is Patrick Bateman from American Psychowhile the one for hunger for success and salesmanship on the phone is Jordan Belfort of The Wolf of Wall Street. These characters are notoriously not also models of virtue, and in fact in the face of scenes that mimic those of American inspirations in the film it is always highlighted how Doris was a good banker, a supportive work colleague, a correct and generous person , who always had the well-being of his colleagues or competitors in mind and was always ready to help people in difficulty.
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The film’s ambition is to combine Doris’s image of a highly successful businessman with that of a simple person who remained anchored to country values. This is shown well in the first scene, in which we see him as an old man, in 2008, playing cards at a table in a tavern in the evening, with some farmer friends, and then receiving a phone call announcing the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, after who leaves by helicopter. Much of the film’s objective lies in uniting the exaltation of Doris’s national identity, and therefore of Doris’ typically Italian attitudes and roots, with a more American-style climb to success, made up of seized opportunities and revolutionary ideas not always understood by his associates or superiors.
Starting from the first release of the trailer, the film was greeted with a bit of irony, given the ambition of creating a good mythology around a banker, not exactly the most popular profession in the world, and given the somewhat clumsy ways with which it is carried forward. There is also tomorrow it then has the appearance and approach of fiction, that is, it has the tendency to reduce events, characters and situations to their reference stereotypes, developing a story that is generally easy to watch and understand.
What makes this an unprecedented operation for Italy is that in the past films, documentaries or fiction have been produced to set up a mythology around saints, popes or politicians; more rarely it happened to industrialists, as in the case of Adriano Olivetti, but never before had a film been made about a banker that told of his supposed goodness. It is in a certain sense a more US-type operation, where it is not uncommon for films to be made to create a personal mythology, by people or companies close to the portrayed subject.
This is also why the film does not miss Silvio Berlusconi, a great friend of Ennio Doris, and indeed a founding member of Banca Mediolanum. In There is also tomorrow Berlusconi is a great Doris legend, knowing him is an honor for him and the two recognize each other as great entrepreneurial minds who focus on goodness, serenity, smiles and affability. Paolo Sorrentino had also noticed that Doris and Berlusconi were similar, who to underline it in They, his film about Silvio Berlusconi, had Toni Servillo play Doris, that is, the same actor who played Berlusconi. That film already talked about the sensational gesture of insuring the savings of Banca Mediolanum’s customers by drawing on the assets of the two founders, but in a more cynical and less idealistic tone.
A very clear purpose of the operation, in addition to telling Doris, is to celebrate Banca Mediolanum, praised for its business approach and the effectiveness of its investments, and described as perfect for businessmen and farmers. Very often the story includes explanations of what makes Banca Mediolanum unique using the language of advertising. Ennio Doris himself had achieved great personal fame by personally participating in his bank’s advertisements, using the famous image of the circle drawn in the sand. That gesture, which is very effective, does not fail to be repeated in the film, used by Ennio’s father, a very poor cow breeder, to impart to his still child one of the many life precepts that will be useful to him when he grows up.
The film was released on April 15 and will be in theaters for three days. It is a distribution method that has spread in recent years with good success, the one called “event release”, which concentrates distribution in a few days, trying to convey the idea that the few opportunities to see a film at the cinema make that more desirable experience. The goal is to fill the rooms, even if for a few days (which are not normally weekends and therefore usually freer). Furthermore, by law, an event release also allows you to shorten the time that must pass between the transition to the cinema and other forms of exploitation such as rental or streaming on the platform, up to the transition to free television.
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On Monday evening, on its first day in theaters, the film was first in the box office charts with almost €83,000, a good figure and above expectations for this type of film. Five days earlier, on the day of its premiere, it had even grossed €170,000 in one evening (more than double that of its first real day in cinemas). It must be kept in mind, however, that although Cinetel data always refers to takings from real tickets actually sold, it is not necessarily the case that these correspond to individual paying spectators.
Last week’s surprising result was in fact the result of some invitation-only previews organized by the distributor. It’s not uncommon for a film to be shown a few days beforehand to a good number of people, so that some word of mouth is built up in time for the release. In the case of There is also tomorrow however, a day without many rivals and a fairly high number of these invitation-only previews, for customers or employees, had brought the film to the top of the rankings. The survey is based on ticket sales and, although individual viewers of those previews received the tickets as freebies, they were still regularly purchased and therefore count.
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